“People have often made fun of me for having health anxiety.”

I’ve had health anxiety for as long as I can remember. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever lived an anxiety-free life.

My health anxiety is by far the worst type of anxiety I have. I can’t quite say when it started, but the first memory I have of being sure I was going to die in my sleep, I must have been 6 or 7.

For some reason I had a bit of Dettol antiseptic on my fingers. I had probably scraped my knee earlier that day and not washed my hands after cleaning my graze. But I had Dettol antiseptic on my fingers, and a nasty habit of bitting my nails. I was lying in bed, biting my nails when I realised that I had a disgusting taste of Dettol in my mouth.

Now most people would probably just think, “That tastes rank.” Not me. I was sure I was going to die that night because I had swallowed- well, more like tasted- the Dettol antiseptic on my fingers. I couldn’t sleep after that. I said goodbye to my family in my mind, mentally thanked them for loving me and preparing myself for the inevitability of death. I eventually went to sleep and woke up the next morning- I was so relieved to be alive.

However, I didn’t realise back then that this was just the beginning of a long relationship with what people love to reduce as just being a ‘hypochondriac’ but, in reality, is a life long struggle of constantly thinking you are dying because of a certain disease, then refusing to go the the doctors because the fear of having that disease is so overwhelming that you’d rather just die from it.

People have often made fun of me for having health anxiety. The worst thing is that I never realised that my health anxiety was so apparent to others. I have been suffering from it for so long, it is now just a part of me. A part of me that I have sort of grown to appreciate in some way. I do make fun of my health anxiety because I realise how crazy I sound when I talk about my quirks. But this condition has actually been a great source of stress for me, and it has actually been very difficult to live with a condition that is often just reduced to ‘being dramatic’.